Computer issues finally resolved

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Hi everyone! You might have been wondering why I haven't been as active over the past week; well here's why, but it's a long story.

Basically, I'm sitting with my laptop on in the middle of Discrete Structures class when all of the sudden it goes "beep beep!" and I get an error message saying that my computer could not find a bootable hard drive. Well, knowing this could mean nothing good, I took it to the IT deparment - which btw, if you are ever considering going to the University of Wyoming, their IT department is awesome - and they told me that my hard drive was about to fail.

At that point I was going into panic mode, but thankfully they calmed me down and told me that if I could get a hard drive, they would take care of transferring data over to it. They also pointed me in the general direction of NewEgg, an online store that has some damn good deals on computer parts and accessories, and showed me how to remove my old hard drive. So I go home, look up the specs on my hard drive, and find the exact same hard drive, brand name and spec-wise, on sale at NewEgg for about $50. I ordered it online and waited.

This past Monday my new hard drive came in the mail, so today I took it to IT to have them transfer the data. Unfortunately, it turned out that the part of the HD that was corrupted contained my OS files. Frustrated, I finally decided that I had had it up to here with Windows Vista and its bugginess, and decided to upgrade to Windows 7. Normally that costs $120, but I was able to buy a student license for the software for the grand price of... $20. I can only keep it if I graduate, but that's not a problem to me. The guys from IT formatted the new hard drive and walked me through the installation process.

Now I am sitting and typing from my laptop, now running Windows 7 and doing great. Course, my data is still all on the old hard drive, but IT should be able to transfer most of my files. Let it be known that the UW IT department is officially awesome.

And as for my new OS, I think Arnold Schwartzenegger put it right when he said, "Hasta la Vista, baby!"

There are some great online backup solutions now, so you can save all your important stuff on a sign-in website as a backup in case your computer is lost or fails. You can use Google Docs http://www.electronista.com/articles/10 ... .to.1gb.2/ for this, with individual files up to 250 MB and total storage of 1 GB. Nothing like your hard disk size, but plenty for coursework.

You are really lucky, if only VISTA got hosed!